A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



the gate &quot; in Macbeth, as if it were unique. But 

 there is not a tragedy of Shakspere s in which the 

 winds do not hold their breath while he taps on 

 the windows of your soul. These little interludes 

 &quot; have nothing to do with the case &quot; in a dramatic 

 sense. They are the divine irrelevance of Na 

 ture herself who moves by surprises and not by 

 precedent. 



My Daphne would not have been so vivid if 

 she had not come out of the gusts. She sat there 

 against the grays and the browns of the despoiled 

 wood, making an interlude that must have gone 

 racing off like those leaves into my recollections 

 forever. With the Shaksperian mood upon me, 

 I felt for my knife. I would carve her name in 

 the tree. What prettier entablature of the event ! 

 To my astonishment the tree already bore scores 

 of names when I came to look at it. Was she 

 then the actress Rosalind, who sat regularly under 

 this tree for all the actors who came along? In a 

 twinkling she dispelled that doubt by saying, 

 &quot;Why, it s a beech tree, and men come under it 

 in a thunderstorm and wait, because a beech tree 

 is never struck by lightning, and they always cut 

 their names in it, I suppose.&quot; 



These November winds have a large winnow 

 ing benignity. - They come with their brooms 

 and clean house bravely. All the exhalations of 

 the dead summer and all the off-cast clothing of 

 the autumn are swept away. They hunt out the 

 miasma, and descend like the Sabines on the hid 

 ing fogs. Away, all of you, begone ! The earth 



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